from the it-kinda-leads-to-actual-wars dept

For years we've been writing about the weird US government infatuation with the Chinese telco equipment firm, Huawei. The company has built a widely successful business, but going back many years there's been a loud whisper campaign that the company's equipment would send information back to the Chinese government. Of course, when our own government investigated this, it could find no evidence at all that this was true. It also seems notable that Huawei itself asked for this investigation, claiming that it would clear the company's name, since it wasn't doing anything that people were accusing it of doing. This doesn't mean that the company isn't doing something nefarious, but such claims should have some sort of evidence to back them up, and so far they've been lacking.

Of course, this may have been one of those situations where people assumed that whatever we would do to others, others must be doing to us, because what we do know, is that the NSAbroke into Huawei's computers and grabbed a bunch of emails and source code. That bit seems to get left out of all the fear mongering reporting about Huawei. Oh, and it later came out that much of the whisper campaign about Huawei spying for the Chinese government... originated from the US firm Cisco, which was seeing its market share eroded by Huawei.

So we've long taken the claims about Huawei with a large grain of salt, even as most in the media have been willing to repeat the allegations about Huawei without mentioning the lack of evidence, Cisco's involvement, or the fact that the US government swiped a bunch of stuff from Huawei, even though all of those things seem kinda relevant.

By now, of course, you've probably heard that Canadian officials arrested Huawei's CFO, Meng Wanzhou, who also happens to be the daughter of the founder, and there are plans to try to extradite her to the US. While no charges have been revealed, most people claim it has to do with violating US sanctions on Iran by shipping US made equipment to Iran. The details here will matter, but it's still incredibly unusual to have a friendly country arrest a top exec and then try to extradite them.

Even if the official charges have nothing to do with the ongoing trade war with China, as nearly everyone is pointing out, there's no way this doesn't create massive blowback on any new trade agreement. Remember it was just a few days ago (was it really just a few days?) that President Trump announced that he'd agreed to end the senseless trade war he'd started (which has created a massive import tax on American businesses and consumers). Of course, when the Chinese gave their version of the story, it sounded remarkably different than Trump's version.

But, at least it sounded like progress was being made, and maybe we could end the insanity. But, of course, by having an ally arrest a top exec, it's thrown everything up in the air. Imagine, for example, if Sheryl Sandberg was on a trip to Pakistan, and was arrested by authorities there and extradited to China to face criminal charges. That's kind of the equivalent of what the US has just done via Canada.

Then, take it a step further. White House officials have told the press that they believe Meng "could be used as leverage with China in trade talks," and you realize this has fuck all to do with Iranian sanctions. No, that's the White House more or less admitting that they've taken a hostage in a trade war. That's hellishly dangerous. Because China will not hesitate to retaliate. If I were an American business exec, I'd stay far away from China or any of its allies right about now.

Arresting an executive over such a thing, and then admitting you want to use her as "leverage," just as you're negotiating a complex trade deal is... the kind of thing that turns a trade war into an actual war. It's an incredibly dangerous move that should concern everyone.

from the hey-that's-a-big-deal dept

While we knew it was impossible for President Obama to truly rein in the massive executive powers that he helped expand (following on the massive expansions from previous administrations) concerning national surveillance and war -- we had still hoped that maybe his concern about a President Trump would let him do a few small things to limit some of the most egregious powers. Instead, it appears that President Obama is doing the opposite, and expanding his war powers, just as he's about to hand them to someone that he, himself, has loudly criticized as being unfit for the Presidency.

For years now, we've written about how the Obama administration has regularly rewritten the dictionary in order to pretend that the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) hastily granted by Congress in the wake of 9/11 enabled him to go to war with basically anyone. If you don't recall, the AUMF granted the President the power to use "all necessary and appropriate force" to go after those who "planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001." That's already fairly broad, but over the years basically our entire government has pretended that (1) the AUMF included the ability to also target "associated forces" (even though it does not) and (2) it allowed the President to simply lump in anyone he wanted as an "associated force" allowing him to bomb them without any Congressional authorization. This is how you get a war without end, in which the explicit authorization to go after Al Qaeda is now being used on a surprisingly long list of groups that didn't even exist in 2001.

And, just a few days ago, President Obama expanded the list yet again, allowing himself to go after yet another group: Shabab. Now, no one is trying to claim that Shabab, or ISIS or any other group that has been added to the list aren't out to do serious harm to the US. But, this seems to go way beyond the basic functions of the office of the President and the simple Constitutional requirement for Congress to declare war. As Trevor Timm notes at the Guardian, this is a big deal:

Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Micah Zenko didn’t mince words in the Times when describing what the Obama administration is doing: “It’s crazy,” he said of the administration’s redefining the law out of existence. “This administration leaves the Trump administration with tremendously expanded capabilities and authorities.”

Make no mistake: Trump will have a free hand to use the law meant for the perpetrators of 9/11 to wage war around the world, fashioning it to different enemies at his command, and he will be able to point to precedent set by the Obama administration as he does it.

Per usual, all the White House’s decisions are being made under the veil of official secrecy. The only reason we know about it is not because the administration announced it, but because the New York Times reported it after unnamed officials leaked it to them.

Trump is now coming into office with ever expanding war powers, and they’re being served to him on a silver platter by the same people who told the American public two months ago that Trump was so unstable and thin-skinned that he couldn’t be trusted with the nuclear codes.

This isn't about which President or which party you support. It seems like we should all be concerned with the ever growing power of the executive branch in general, and especially its willingness to grant itself more powers to go around and kill people.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

The space right above our planet's atmosphere is cluttered with human technology and space junk, and it's getting more crowded up there all the time. Sure, the vastness of the universe is practically infinite, but there are only a few Lagrange points, and artificial satellites have started to run into traffic problems -- including intentional satellite destruction that might not be quite innocuous. Wars over outer space might become a real thing in the not so distant future, if it's not happening already.

Is it possible to launch a satellite as an individual? Not just some weather balloon junk, but a cubesat or something that will actually orbit a few times... Yes, but it'll cost you over $100,000 to hitch a ride on a Soyuz mission. Korean artist, Hojun Song, successfully launched a 1-kg cubesat called OSSI-1 -- so if you have the resources, it can be done. And presumably, your satellite will have to be completely harmless, so you don't start an international incident. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Artificial intelligence is obviously pretty far from gaining sentience or even any kind of disturbingly smart general intelligence, but some of its advances are nonetheless pretty impressive (eg. beating human chess grandmasters, playing poker, driving cars, etc). Software controls more and more stuff that come in contact with people, so more people are starting to wonder when all of this smart technology might turn on us humans. It's not a completely idle line of thinking. Self-driving cars/trucks are legitimate safety hazards. Autonomous drones might prevent firefighters from doing their job. There are plenty of situations that are not entirely theoretical in which robots could potentially harm large numbers of people unintentionally (and possibly in a preventable fashion). Where should we draw the line? Asimov's 3 laws of robotics may be insufficient, so what kind of ethical coding should we adopt instead?

from the even-if-they-don't,-they-hardly-promote-peace dept

Last August, we wrote about the most egregious corporate sovereignty award (so far): $50 billion against Russia, under a treaty that it never even ratified, in favor of the major shareholders of the Yukos oil company. Of course, as everyone pointed out, being awarded $50 billion was one thing, collecting it, quite another. Most people probably assumed that it would be practically impossible to squeeze that money out of a recalcitrant Russia, but we now learn that some serious steps towards that goal have recently been taken, as reported by Der Spiegel (original in German). In Belgium, the bank accounts of the Russian embassy were frozen, as were those of Russia's EU and NATO missions, while in France, something similar happened, with Russian accounts blocked at 40 banks.

Understandably, this did not go down well with the Russian government. The country's deputy foreign minister warned, "whoever dares to do that must understand that it will lead to reprisals," something his boss, Sergei Lavrov echoed. Meanwhile, Lavrov's own boss, Vladimir Putin, was also well aware of the situation, and was quoted as saying: "we will defend our interests using legal means."

A story on France 24 reports that Russia has already threatened to retaliate against state-linked foreign firms operating in the country, so that's one way that things could escalate. But more seriously, the relations between Russia and EU nations are extremely strained over the conflict in eastern Ukraine; the last thing the situation needs is additional tension caused by arguments over a massive fine. Even if corporate sovereignty doesn't actually cause a war -- well, let's hope not -- the Yukos award may turn into a hindrance to resolving an existing conflict. That's yet another reason to get rid of the whole deeply-flawed system before it causes more serious damage.

from the and-for-not-giving-his-precious-nsa-your-data dept

Rep. Mike Rogers is just about out of Congress, but the NSA's biggest defender (despite his supposed role in "overseeing" the agency) is using his last days on Capitol Hill to keep pushing his favorite causes. Over the weekend, he complained that President Obama basically should have gone to "cyberwar" with North Korea over the Sony hack.

“Unfortunately, he’s laid out a little of the playbook,” Rogers said. “That press conference should have been here are the actions.” ...

Without discussing specifics, Rogers said the U.S. has the capability to cripple North Korea’s cyberattack capabilities, which have been rapidly improving over the last few years.

“I can tell you we have the capability to make this very difficult for them in the future,” he said.

And I can tell you that Mike Rogers is full of bluster with little basis. First off, there is still some fairly strong skepticism in the actual computer security field that North Korea was behind the hack. Launching an all out attack without more proof would seem premature. Second, Rogers is simply wrong or clueless. We don't have the capability to "cripple" anyone's "cyberattack capabilities" unless he means taking out the entire internet. There are always ways around that. Even the reports that we've seen that do blame North Korea don't seem to think the full attack came from North Korea, so doing something like taking the few internet connections in North Korea off the map wouldn't do much good if the actual attack came from, say, China or Eastern Europe or somewhere else.

Third, can we just get over this ridiculous idea that a hack of one company, which may or may not have been by actors working for a government, is an act of either "terrorism" or "war." It's not. It's a hack. Tons of companies get hacked every day. Some have good security and still get hacked. Some, like Sony, appear to have terrible security and get hacked very easily. It's not terrorism. It's not war. It's a hack. We shouldn't be talking about retaliation or destroying countries over a hack. We should be talking about better security. Jim Harper does a good job explaining why an overreaction is a bad idea:

The greatest risk in all this is that loose talk of terrorism and “cyberwar” lead nations closer to actual war. Having failed to secure its systems, Sony has certainly lost a lot of money and reputation, but for actual damage to life and limb, you ain’t seen nothing like real war. It is not within well-drawn boundaries of U.S. national security interests to avenge wrongs to U.S. subsidiaries of Japanese corporations. Governments in the United States should respond to the Sony hack with nothing more than ordinary policing and diplomacy.

But, no, not Mike Rogers. Instead, he's using this as his opportunity to push for his favorite bad law: giving the NSA more power to sift through your data:

Rogers, who is retiring from Congress in just a few days, made a final plug for his bill to facilitate cybersecurity information sharing between the private sector and National Security Agency (NSA). The measure passed the House, but stalled in the Senate, held up by privacy concerns.

It’s necessary, Rogers argued, if the U.S. wants to protect itself from similar attacks in the future. Because of laws on the books, the NSA is limited in its ability to protect private critical infrastructure networks.

He's talking, of course, about his beloved CISPA, which would effectively remove any liability from companies for sharing your private data with the NSA (and the rest of the government). But, as per usual with Rogers, he's wrong about nearly all of the details. There is nothing in CISPA that would have made it so the NSA could have "protected" Sony. Sony's problem here was Sony's terrible computer security. So, no, we don't need CISPA or other cybersecurity legislation to better protect the internet.

And is Mike Rogers really trying to argue that Sony's private intranet is "critical infrastructure"?

Finally, there's nothing in the law today that stops a company from sharing "malicious source code" with the government or others. We already have a good way for dealing with that that doesn't require a new law that gives the NSA more access to everyone's data.

Either way, it looks like Rogers is going out in typical fashion -- shooting his mouth off in favor of his friends and pet projects, without actually understanding or caring about the details. No wonder he's going into AM talk radio. He'll be a perfect fit.

from the US-still-tops-in-'sound-and-fury,'-trailing-the-pack-in-'significanc dept

If there's anything our government can do well, it's take a word loaded with tension and abuse it to the point of abstraction. First, we had "war." The word described the hellish events of the First and Second World War, along with armed, bloody conflicts dating back to the rebellious creation of the nation itself. Now, it's simply a term applied to any conflict with the weight of a self-serving bureaucracy propelling it. A "war" on drugs. A "war" on illiteracy. And so on.

The horrors endured by both sides of the Vietnam "conflict" were never afforded the gravity of the word "war." The same goes with every military intervention since then. We've been in Iraq and Afghanistan for years, but there's no "war" there -- at least nothing officially declared. There's only violence and death and occasional sharp bursts of more violence and death. There's a "war" on drugs in Afghanistan, but that's even more of an abject failure than our other long-running military efforts -- $7 billion spent and poppy production at an all-time high.

There's a "war" on terror in progress as well, but this brings us to another word robbed of any gravitas by constant abuse: "terror." Terrorism is what fuels our nation's security/surveillance state. But "terror" and "terrorism" -- words that once carried some weight -- are now abstractions. They're buzzwords pressed into service by the US government as a sales pitch for an illusion of security. And it all can be yours for less than a Fourth Amendment violation a day.

Which brings us to another set of loaded words that once were evocative but now have been stripped of their ability to move masses.

An emergency declared by President Jimmy Carter on the 10th day of the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 remains in effect almost 35 years later.

A post-9/11 state of national emergency declared by President George W. Bush — and renewed six times by President Obama — forms the legal basis for much of the war on terror.

Tuesday, President Obama informed Congress he was extending another Bush-era emergency for another year, saying "widespread violence and atrocities" in the Democratic Republic of Congo "pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States."

Declaring a temporary state of emergency has it uses. It temporarily expands government powers in order to facilitate speedy responses. It de-gunks the system of its red tape residue and allows help to arrive when it's needed, rather than weeks after it would have any impact.

But this isn't the case here. Temporary expansions of power have morphed into the new status quo. Since 1976, the government has declared 53 "emergencies." Almost every single one still remains in effect.

Part of the problem is the office of the president. For thirty-plus years, the office has become accustomed to the extra powers granted with each flip of the "emergency" switch. States of emergency are extended. And extended again. Only one state of emergency has been allowed to lapse during the last decade. There is a curb to this power, but like the many other oversight positions its entrusted with, Congress seemingly has no interest in fulfilling its duty.

The 1976 law requires each house of Congress to meet within six months of an emergency to vote it up or down. That's never happened.

And so, "state of emergency" becomes shorthand for government abuse. It conjures up images of towns destroyed by national disasters or extreme threats from foreign nations, but in practice it's rarely anything more than a leading indicator of governmental power grabs. What can this nation's government do during a "state of emergency?" This very small sampling of "extra powers" is chilling.

Reshape the military, putting members of the armed forces under foreign command, conscripting veterans, overturning sentences issued by courts-martial and taking over weather satellites for military use.

Suspend environmental laws, including a law forbidding the dumping of toxic and infectious medical waste at sea.

Bypass federal contracting laws, allowing the government to buy and sell property without competitive bidding.

"Emergency" is the new normal. For thirty years this nation has "struggled" under multiple states of emergency. What should be a very limited, very short-term solution to unexpected or dangerous situations is now indistinguishable from everyday life. More fear is sold by government agencies and purchased -- via tax dollars -- by a public unable to prevent the checks from clearing. Like the boy who cried wolf, the government has stripped "emergency" of its galvanizing power. Hearing a "state of emergency" being declared by the president most likely won't move hearts reflexively to throats but will prompt a certain number of hands to make protective moves towards wallets and purse strings. And it will definitely move the average American closer to cynicism than patriotism.

When everything is an "emergency" that never ends, nothing is. President Obama says there's no need to declare a state of emergency over the worldwide spread of Ebola. He's likely right, but the words are meaningless. Declare it. Don't declare it. It makes no difference to anyone outside of those directly benefiting from (likely permanent) expansion of government powers.

What is the government going to do once it's used up all the evocative words? Where does it go next? Apocalypse? The government is inherently untrustworthy, and its inability to express itself without using buzzwords, hyperbole and the broadest of strokes isn't helping.

Voter apathy? Record lows in approval ratings? These are only symptoms. The disease is the government itself and its willingness to present everything as the Worst Ever in order to erode rights, expand power and appropriate public funding.

from the words-mean-something dept

We've written before about how the NSA uses its own definitions of some fairly basic English words, in order to pretend to have the authority to do things it probably... doesn't really have authority to do. It's become clear that this powergrab-by-redefinition is not unique to the NSA when it comes to the executive branch of the government. Earlier this year, we also wrote about the stunning steady redefinition of words within the infamous "Authorization to Use Military Force" (AUMF) that was passed by Congress immediately after September 11, 2001. It officially let the President use "all necessary and appropriate force" against those who "planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001." But, over time, the AUMF was being used to justify efforts against folks who had nothing to do with September 11th, leading to this neat sleight of hand in which the military started pretending that the AUMF also applied to "associated forces." That phrase appears nowhere in the AUMF, but it's a phrase that is regularly repeated and claimed by the administration and the military.

But, it goes beyond that. As Trevor Timm highlights over at The Guardian, pretty much the entire drone bombing (drones, by the way, are also apparently "authorized" by the AUMF) of Syria involves the administration conveniently redefining basic English to suit its purposes. Let's start with the authorization for the bombing itself:

In other words: the legal authority provided to the White House to strike al-Qaida and invade Iraq more than a dozen years ago now means that the US can wage war against a terrorist organization that’s decidedly not al-Qaida, in a country that is definitely not Iraq.

It's amazing what you can accomplish when you pretend words mean something entirely different than they do. Hell, if you can just make words mean whatever the hell you want them to mean, there's no such thing as a limitation on what you can do. It's all fair game. Who needs laws when the law is basically a mad libs for you to fill in what you want?

Moving on. The definitional jujitsu covers the people who were killed by the bombing as well. Civilians? What civilians?

[A]n “imminent” threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons will take place in the immediate future.

To translate: “imminent” can mean a lot of things … including “not imminent”.

This is pretty neat. Anything else you've got for us? How about "combat" or "ground troops"? They're not what you think they are either, because a malleable language can do anything:

As the New York Times’s Mark Landler detailed over the weekend, White House has “an extremely narrow definition of combat … a definition rejected by virtually every military expert.” According to the Obama administration, the 1600 “military advisers” that have steadily been flowing in Iraq fall outside this definition, despite the fact that “military advisers” can be: embedded with Iraqi troops; carry weapons; fire their weapons if fired upon; and call in airstrikes. In the bizarro dictionary of war employed by this White House, none of that qualifies as “combat”.

Yes, the English language changes over time and that's generally a good thing. But we're not talking about the way the word "decimate" once meant to lop off 10% and now means "destroy everything." This is a deliberate misrepresentation of things.

Hell, this seems to go further than Orwell even imagined with his authoritarian use of language and rewriting of history. In this case, rather than just saying "we were always at war with Eurasia," he could have just changed the definition of "we," "were," "always," "at," "war," "with," and "Eurasia," and it would have been that much more powerful.

- Some of the countries (out of a total of 17) whose militaries have fewer helicopters than Arizona law enforcement agencies (according to statistics gathered by the CIA and posted at GlobalFirePower.com)

The ACLU's extensive report on police militarization shows a nation at war with itself. The War on Terror -- a 13-year windmill joust that has generated an excess of military equipment -- has merged with the War on Drugs, an exercise in futility seven years removed from the half-century mark.

Actual military combat, utilizing enlisted soldiers, has given birth to the same equipment now routinely being deployed to fight the crime formerly policed by normal police officers. Cell tower spoofers, surveillance drones, Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected personnel carriers (MRAPs) -- all of these were developed for use by the military. And all of these have now found homes in local law enforcement armories.

The requisition forms are littered with terrorism-related terms, but the reality of the situation is much more banal. Low-level drug dealers are being dealt with like enemy combatants. Law enforcement agencies claim with straight faces that they're falling behind in the arms and technology race, all the while acquiring the best weaponry and technology tax dollars can buy.

These are then handed over to SWAT teams, special police forces developed to take on truly dangerous situations like riots, active shooters, hostage situations and barricaded suspects. They are outfitted in military gear and sent out to perform the everyday task of serving search warrants.

These teams prefer to do this mundane task with a maximum amount of chaos and violence. Warrants are delivered with no-knock raids, ostensibly to give the police department the upper hand on the presumed-to-be-dangerous occupants. In reality, this is the sort of thing that happens far too frequently.

[B]efore 3:00am on a night in May of 2014, a team of SWAT officers armed with assault rifles burst into the room where the family was sleeping. Some of the kids’ toys were in the front yard, but the Habersham County and Cornelia police officers claimed they had no way of knowing children might be present. One of the officers threw a flashbang grenade into the room. It landed in Baby Bou Bou’s crib.

It took several hours before Alecia and Bounkahm, the baby’s parents, were able to see their son. The 19-month-old had been taken to an intensive burn unit and placed into a medically induced coma. When the flashbang grenade exploded, it blew a hole in 19-month-old Bou Bou’s face and chest. The chest wound was so deep it exposed his ribs. The blast covered Bou Bou’s body in third degree burns.

Three weeks later, it's still unclear whether the child will survive. The SWAT predicated its warrant on a $50 drug purchase from someone who didn't even live at that residence. No drugs or guns were found. No arrests were made.

Note that the police defended their actions by claiming they had "no way of knowing" if children might be present. But that lack of crucial knowledge had zero effect on its tactics. Officers didn't throw a flashbang grenade into the house because they were sure there were no children present. Officers threw a flashbang grenade into the house because that's what SWAT teams do when they serve no-knock warrants. The question of children was never raised, at least not until their actions had placed a child in a medical coma and now needed to be defended. A safer assumption would be that nearly every house being raided has a child in it. Most houses do.

This is how law enforcement's new toys get used: to take down lowball drug dealers. A large majority of warrants served are drug-related. The ACLU has the stats.

The problem is more troubling than mere mission creep. The new armor and weapons are begging to be used. These acquisitions, often obtained over the protests of the populace under the agency's "protection" (or just as often, without their knowledge), need to be justified. The terrorism threat cited in requisition forms just isn't going to present itself. And so, law enforcement agencies deploy these against the next best thing: the neighborhood drug dealer boogeyman.

The whole report is, by turns, fascinating, brutal and deeply concerning. Some claim the militarization of the police is a misconception, an illusion generated by a handful of vocal journalists. But the ACLU has the numbers that say otherwise.

Law enforcement knows this is the truth. The government's misguided generosity has allowed local law enforcement to stockpile weapons and armor, but hasn't given it any limitations or guidance. And the stated reason -- terrorism -- simply isn't common enough to justify a one-sided arms "race," no matter how far the definition of "terrorist" is stretched. So, the weapons and armor are used to carry out search warrants, bringing unnecessary amounts of chaos and violence to something police used to handle with an authoritative knock and possibly a scuffle or two if things went south. Now, it's de rigueur. The tools can't be allowed to gather dust and the War on Drugs can't risk any more casualties -- at least not on the part of the enforcers.

from the why,-we've-always-been-at-war-with-eurasia dept

Back in May, we noted the oddity of the charges in Bradley Manning's trial, in which he was accused of aiding three different "enemies," with the last one being classified. Specifically, he was accused of aiding Al-Qaida, Al-Qaida of the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP, which is different than AQ itself) and... mystery enemy. Back at the beginning of July, the government quietly dropped the charge against the classified enemy, so that's no longer in play in that case. That said, apparently this concept of classifying who we're at war with wasn't just limited to the Manning trial. ProPublica has the ridiculous and frightening tale of finding out that the answer to the simple question of who the US is at war with, is apparently classified as well.

At a hearing in May, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., asked the Defense Department to provide him with a current list of Al Qaeda affiliates.

The Pentagon responded – but Levin’s office told ProPublica they aren’t allowed to share it. Kathleen Long, a spokeswoman for Levin, would say only that the department’s “answer included the information requested.”

The Pentagon also went on to tell ProPublica that revealing who we're actually at war with would do "serious damage to national security." The main reason? They think those groups would use the info as good publicity and allow them to recruit more. But that's ridiculous, since those groups are already being targeted by the US:

Jack Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard Law who served as a legal counsel during the Bush administration and has written [6]on this question [7] at length, told ProPublica that the Pentagon’s reasoning for keeping the affiliates secret seems weak. “If the organizations are ‘inflated’ enough to be targeted with military force, why cannot they be mentioned publicly?” Goldsmith said. He added that there is “a countervailing very important interest in the public knowing who the government is fighting against in its name."

It really goes beyond that when you think about it. This lack of transparency out of some silly fear that these groups would use it to build up their own reputation is just wacky. It leaves open such massive loopholes for abuse by the government.

Every time we talk about things like this, people trot out the same old joke: it really means that "the public" is "the enemy." That, obviously, is an exaggeration, but the level of secrecy around all of these kinds of efforts -- in the mistaken belief that letting anyone know who you're fighting and what you're doing will somehow undermine the whole campaign -- is entirely antithetical to the kind of example we should be setting around the globe. And, of course, it's doubly ironic that the very same people who are defending this lack of transparency are the ones who trot out the "if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide." The obvious response, then, is that we should be asking exactly what our government is trying to hide, because it sure sounds like they've done a lot of things wrong.